After several months of hard work, I was finally able to shakedown my wife enough to agree to allow me to spend the money to get a 15GB iPod.

I’ve read about, as well as seen images of Apple’s extraordinarily close attention to detail when it comes to a person’s experience of opening up one of their products.

No wonder I’ve always been an avid Mac fanatic.

I opened up the box, and meticulously examined every piece that came in the box. I couldn’t believe how small it was. I remember seeing the original 5GB iPod at the Apple Store in Valley Fair Mall in San Jose a few years back, and it was twice the size as this one. It suddenly occurred to me how small the iPod Mini must really be. Whoa.

I connected it to my FireWire slot, and fired up iTunes (which I had already installed). Apparently I never knew how smart iTunes was either. I’ve got an MP3 folder, and all of my songs are organized by first letter of the group/artist. I took my (grand)parent MP3 folder and dropped it into my iTunes playlist. iTunes read through, and added all 2249 songs to my playlist, which I promptly synced with my new iPod. After about 10 minutes, my entire collection in one, single, ready-to-go spot.

Amazing. Simply amazing.